She asked if they were lords who owned those beautiful houses built up
on the hill, and half-smothered among lilacs and ash-trees and
rowan-trees and ivy.
"My darling," Lavender had said to her, "if your papa were to come and
live here, he could buy half a dozen of these cottages, gardens and all.
They are mostly the property of well-to-do shopkeepers. If this little
place takes your fancy, what will you say when you go South--when you
see Wimbledon and Richmond and Kew, with their grand old commons and
trees? Why, you could hide Oban in a corner of Richmond Park!"
"And my papa has seen all these places?"
"Yes. Don't you think it strange he should have seen them all, and known
he could live in any of them, and then gone away back to Borva?"
"But what would the poor people have done if he had never gone back?"
"Oh, some one else would have taken his place."
"And then, if he were living here, or in London, he might have got
tired, and he might have wished to go back to the Lewis and see all the
people he knew; and then he would come among them like a stranger, and
have no house to go to."